"That's what lying is"

"The Three Faces of Joe" photomontage triptych of Ambassador Joseph Wilson as The Holy Father (left), Satan (center) and Speaker of Truth to Power

"That's what lying is, by the way: intentional deceit, not unreliable intelligence," notes Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times, for the benefit of those of the Left who still don't get it:

Heigh-ho. It would be nice to hear his media boosters howling en masse, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" But Joe Wilson's already slipping down the old media memory hole. He served his purpose -- he damaged Bush, he tainted the liberation of Iraq . . . what matters to the media and to Senator Kerry is that he helped the cause of (to quote his book title) The Politics Of Truth, and if it takes a serial liar to do that, so be it.

The obvious explanation for Wilson's deceit about what he found in Africa is that his hatred of Bush outweighed everything else. Or as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L. Simon put it, "He is a deeply evil human being willing to lie and obfuscate for temporary political gain about a homicidal dictator's search for weapons-grade uranium."

Steyn's article, "How a serial liar suckered Dems and the media," is at the moment No. 1 at Blogdex, Elton John's temper tantrum -- blogged here -- is No. 2, and nicely rounding things out at No. 3 is Tim Rutten's Los Angeles Times piece, "Fuel for the pro-war blogs," a textbook demonstration of Steyn's point about the "old media memory hole." Rutten frontloads his piece with a tired retelling of the flawed narrative of the Wilson/Plame affair, including Wilson's now thoroughly-discredited NYT Op Ed, claiming wide eyed

All of this quite naturally produced a series of news stories, many of which ran on the front pages of leading newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times.

We suppose it's natural if you aren't concerned about fact-checking your sources.

Choreographed editorials and Op-Ed pieces … in the Wall Street Journal and National Review and by conservative columnist Robert Novak signaled the revving up of a Republican campaign to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his claims that President Bush trumpeted flimsy intelligence in the drive to invade Iraq."

But did the mainstream media, in the meantime, actually ignore the story? Given the magnitude of the implications in both the U.S. and Britain's intelligence assessments, the Plame/Wilson affair is a bit of a footnote.

There you go again, Mr. Rutten, projecting your own methods -- choreographed editorials and Op Ed pieces -- onto your adversaries.  You may get your marching orders from the daily DNC talking points memo, but we prefer to think for ourselves.

Blog note: Interestingly, Rutten cites the same Simon quotation about "a deeply evil human being" that Steyn does (we quoted the same words here the other day). A meme is born?

Comments

[Bloggerhead]

Sissy:

Perhaps you should re-read Wilson's op-ed before relying on Mark Steyn to discredit it for you. Wilson never says that Iraq didn't seek to procure yellow-cake, in fact, he references an Iraqi delegation that may well have. What he says is that the Iraqis never actually procured the yellow-cake, nor even entered into an agreement to do so, which is precisely what he had been sent to investigate by virtue of notorious documents of sale out of Italy that the IAEA later saw were forgeries and are now universally regarded as such.

As to very whether the existence of the Iraqi delegation to Niger, in 1999, justifies the president using slippery language like the infamous 16 words in the SOTU, well, I guess it all depends on what standards you have for your president, and, I guess, your political affiliation. (I seem to remember during the Clinton years the Right having much more highly refined bullshit detectors.) Nevertheless, it remains that neither the CIA nor the State Dept., at the time, were too keen about having the leader of the free world rely on forged documents, with little or no other substantiation, to state the case for war.

As for Wilson's apparent contradiction about his wife's role in getting him the assignment, that now seems to turn on whether she initiated volunteering him for the job or whether the agency asked her about his going. A pretty thin basis, indeed, upon which to call someone an evil liar, and though doubtless Wilson is something of publicity hound, this hardly justifies the administration's campaign to out a covert agent.

To be sure, Wilson's credibility is taking a bit of beating at the present, and many on the right appear to be rushing towards a complete discrediting before the Plame investigation is over. Yet if a parsed finding here, a minor contradiction there, are enough to demolish the case against the administration's having deceived us into war, then what to make of a president who on two separate occasions has said that we went to war because Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in. The loony bin?

Finally, as to your apparent offense taken at the notion that the Right has an echo chamber all its own, why not try a get a fax number to the RNC, and watch as the daily blasts hurtle your way.

[Sissy Willis]

Too long, Bloggerhead. If your argument is sound, you should be able to put it into a concise, terse, pithy single paragraph (yawn)...

[Brian]

Condensed version: "Yes, but..."

[Bloggerhead]

OK, Thithy, you asked for pithy:

In a desparate attempt to ameliorate the damage of the upcoming Plame indictments, the right-wing Wurlizter (which you didn't even know existed, wake up!) are utilizing the same tactics against Wilson that they accuse him of. The only difference is that Wilson was trying to spare us a pointless war and the international humiliation it has caused us. The president, on the hand, was, well, who knows what the hell he's thinking most of the time. In fact, he may be insane.

[Bloggerhead]

Oops, it should read: "The president, on the other hand..."

Too, sorry about the lengthy argument before, but it's that damnable nuance, and I understand that a vaccum abhors nuance.

Fine site by the way, but the comments preview is larger than my screen, so commenting & previewing is a little laborsome.

[Sissy Willis]

Hey, little guy. You may have missed the 9/11 commission's conclusion re whether or not the Iraqis were Yellowcake shopping. For your edification, they found:

"[CIA's Deputy Chief of Counter-Proliferation Division] said he judged that the most important fact in [Wilson's] report was that the Nigerien officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerien Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium…"

[Sissy Willis]

Very nice, Brian. Brevity is, indeed, the soul of wit!

[Brian]

Reasonable people may have reasonable differences of opinion.

For instance, Bloggerhead may believe that "The only difference is that Wilson was trying to spare us a pointless war and the international humiliation it has caused us," and I may believe that Wilson placed his own partisan interests above the national interest, and that the war was far from pointless, and that I, as an American, have no sense of humiliation whatsoever over the whole affair.

I might believe that President Bush is a good man who made a vow to serve and protect the people of America, and does his best to keep that vow, and Bloggerhead might believe that "The president, on the hand, was, well, who knows what the hell he's thinking most of the time. In fact, he may be insane."

If you would like to debate the actual substance of Wilson's NYT op-ed, and his assertions in general, Bloggerhead, please do yourself a favor and read The Daily Howler's summary of said at:
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh071204.shtml

You could choose to believe that DH is spinning as part of the VRWC, of course, but I believe that would be silly.

[Sharpshooter]

Really amusing, reading Bloggerheads comments, two years down the road.

Can you say "naiveté"? Sure, you can!